The Australian is not a subtle newspaper. But it certainly has a genius for timing.

Within hours of the publication of the Finkelstein report, which documents the widespread public disillusionment with the ethical standards and the political bias of the commercial media in Australia, one of its senior reporters phoned me at work.

The most recent involves a disagreement with the Right over global warming. I now find it difficult to understand how a person of reasonable intelligence is unable to accept the reality and the urgency of the looming climate crisis.

How is the existence of climate change denialism and indeed its increase in recent years to be explained? There seem to me five plausible hypotheses.

The opinion poll results over the past eight months are as bad for an Australian Government as any I can recall.

Can Labor improve its position?

The future of the parliamentary Left in Australia rests now not simply with the Labor Party but with the relationship between Labor and the Greens, in other words with what the Europeans call "the Red-Green alliance".

Somewhat to the surprise of the head of the media inquiry, I had drawn only two main conclusions in my recently published study of The Australian, Bad News.

Firstly, the paper would only change as a consequence of courageous both from outsiders and insiders, and secondly the control of 70 per cent of the newspaper market by a single corporation posed a threat to democracy.

But government regulation is not the answer. The solution lies with the Press Council.

Recently Michael Kroger delivered an address to the Institute of Public Affairs in honour of Andrew Bolt.

"It was Andrew Bolt who challenged Robert Manne to name just 10 members of the Stolen Generation, something Manne has yet to achieve," he said.

Nothing I will ever write will make the slightest difference ... Bolt's 'Name 10' fabrication is now a settled part of contemporary right-wing mythology, a mythology fuelled by Bolt's factually dubious journalism on the Stolen Generations.

If it were up to me, and if I did not care about the wider political consequences, I would allow all asylum seekers who arrive spontaneously on Australian shores by boat to live in the community after a short period of detention for health and security checks.

I would only ask of them that they report to authority until their cases for permanent residence have been assessed by a scrupulously independent tribunal operating on the basis of strict adherence to the international refugee conventions that Australia has signed. For those asylum seekers found not to be refugees, I would support their repatriation, but only when it was clear beyond reasonable doubt that this was safe.

Unhappily, the question of asylum seeker policy cannot be rationally discussed purely on the basis of personal preference, mine or anyone else’s.

Having observed Australian attitudes to the arrival by boat of unauthorised asylum seekers since the mid 1970s, I have arrived at three main conclusions.

1. Australian public opinion is troubled by the spontaneous arrival of asylum seekers on boats. It is not troubled by government programs to re-settle offshore refugees.

During the period of the Fraser government, the uninvited arrival of 2,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers on boats caused some alarm. By contrast, the government’s decision to settle more than 70,000 Indo-Chinese refugees from the detention camps across South East Asia between 1978 and 1983 was more or less uncontroversial.

Thirty years later, a Monash University study, Mapping Social Cohesion by Professor Andrew Markus, discovered that two-thirds of people had a positive attitude to refugees whose cases had been assessed by our authorities overseas. By contrast, in every recent opinion poll, almost two-thirds supported a tougher policy towards unauthorised boat asylum seeker arrivals.

2. With spontaneous boat arrivals, the maintenance of an even remotely humanitarian policy is reliant on bi-partisan political consensus. Fraser was only able to treat the boat arrivals of 1976 and 1977 humanely because the ALP opposition did not in general exploit the issue in the way it might have. In more recent times, the humanitarian option broke down when Labor introduced mandatory detention for a small number of Cambodian asylum seekers who arrived by boat in 1992. It was altogether destroyed when, prior to the 2001 election, Howard decided on an asylum seeker policy of military repulsion and indefinite detention on Nauru and Manus Island for those who could not be militarily repelled.

The policy of the Howard government was overwhelmingly popular by every poll and estimate I’ve seen. In addition, by now the asylum seeker issue had been thoroughly politicised. The question of asylum seekers was important, even perhaps vital, to Howard’s 2001 election victory. As a consequence of the events of 2001, a poison was injected into the political culture whose antidote has not yet been discovered.

3. In terms of its clear deterrent objective, mandatory detention did not work. Under this system, between 1999 and 2001, 12,000 asylum seekers - mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran - arrived by boat. Unlike mandatory detention, military repulsion and detention on Nauru, the so-called Pacific Solution, did however prove to be a successful deterrent. Between the institution of the Pacific Solution in the spring of 2001 and its dismantling under Rudd in the spring of 2008, virtually no asylum seekers came to Australia by boat. Since the dismantling, the boats have returned. In 2010, there were more than 6,000 boat asylum seeker arrivals, a higher number than in any year in Australian history. The trend has continued this year.

For some reason, the friends of asylum seekers continue to resist almost self-evident fact. This resistance is not without political cost for the broad Left.

While Malcolm Turnbull was leader of the Opposition, the asylum seeker issue was merely a headache for the Rudd government. Under Tony Abbott, an unscrupulous populist conservative, it became a nightmare. Abbott understood and exploited to the full the political potential of the issue by supporting the re-introduction of temporary protection visas and the restoration of the Pacific Solution. In this he had the support of about two-thirds of the Australian people.

Rudd’s honourable refusal to compete in what he called a race to the bottom was one of the reasons he was removed from the leadership of the Labor Party. In the words of his Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, the issue was thought by many inside the Labor Party to be killing the Government.

During the 2010 election campaign, following Rudd’s removal, the promise to stop the boats by re-instituting the Pacific Solution was one of the three or four most important items of the Abbott election pitch. To neutralise the issue, Julia Gillard proposed the establishment of a regional processing centre in East Timor, to which asylum seekers who reach Australian territory by boat would be able to be sent to have their claims for refugee status assessed. This is best described as the Pacific Solution with a human face.

Eight months after the election it is almost clear that East Timor will not accept an offshore processing centre.

The asylum seeker issue now poses an acute dilemma for the friends of asylum seekers. Most argue that as both mandatory detention and even more so, the Pacific Solution, are immoral, the Gillard Government should abolish mandatory detention and should not contemplate the establishment of an off-shore processing centre on East Timor or anywhere else.

This position is morally right but altogether unrealistic from the political point of view.

There is virtually no political possibility that the Gillard Government will accept this advice. Moreover if miraculously it did adopt an asylum seeker policy of the kind the friends of the asylum seekers support, three things would most likely follow. The number of asylum seekers arriving by boat would increase substantially, perhaps very substantially in the coming years. Public opinion, which has remained extremely hostile to the spontaneous arrival of boats since 2001, would harden even further against the asylum seekers. The government judged responsible for facilitating their arrival would be harmed. In such a situation the Abbott leadership of the Liberal Party in particular and the force of populist conservatism in general would be strengthened greatly, perhaps even very greatly.

There is however, in my opinion, a practical and humane solution to the Gillard Government’s present asylum seeker problem which could be implemented before the next federal election. For various reasons - some good and some bad - it will not be a solution that is easy for the friends of asylum seekers to accept.

The first step would be to make a speedy assessment of all asylum seekers presently on Australian soil with the aim of emptying the detention centres by the end of this year. Those asylum seekers who are found to be refugees should be given permanent homes. Those who are found not to be refugees should be repatriated but only on the strict condition that their safety is assured. If that is not clear, they should be provided with a form of temporary protection. With human life at stake, it is morally mandatory to err on the side of caution.

The second step would be to approach Papua New Guinea with a proposal to re-open the offshore processing centre on Manus Island. Unlike Nauru, Papua New Guinea is a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. In addition, Manus Island does not carry the kind of contested political symbolism and malign historical baggage that Nauru now does.

If the offer is successful - and it will probably need an increase in Australian foreign aid to PNG - it is vital to insist that the asylum seekers who are transferred to Manus Island after arriving on Australian territory are treated with humanity. They should be housed in comfortable open accommodation, not behind barbed wire. They should be provided with an appropriate and healthy diet; good medical care; education for the children; leisure activities and reading materials for the adults. All this should be directly administered and entirely funded by Australia.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees should be invited to assess the asylum seekers’ claims. Those who are found not to be refugees should be repatriated but again only when it is certain that they will be safe. Those who are found to be genuine refugees should be provided with new homes. It will need to be accepted that most will probably eventually have to be offered homes by Australia.

In order to make this system not only truly just but also to appear so in the eyes of the Australian public, it is important that in the offshore processing centre a real queue be created. Re-settlement places to those found to be refugees should, in general, be offered according to the date of arrival.

In order to prevent Australia and Manus Island becoming a magnet of attraction, it would need to be made crystal clear that no more than a specified number of asylum seekers from Manus Island would be offered re-settlement in Australia each year.

There are several advantages for the Gillard Government of a scheme such as this.

After establishing an offshore processing centre, the Australian people would soon become convinced that the Government had regained control of the country’s borders. This would prevent the Coalition from using the asylum seeker issue for its populist political purposes at the next federal election.

Once the political sting was taken out of the issue, the Government would be able to increase its annual refugee/humanitarian intake from the present 13,750 to something like 20,000 without political cost, as the Fraser government was able to do in regard to the re-settlement of the Indo-Chinese refugees between 1978 and 1983.

An increase in the annual refugee quota should help ensure for the Gillard Government the eventual support of the Greens. It would, more importantly, help save the lives of a larger number of desperate human beings.

It seems to me that friends of asylum seekers are now placed with an uncomfortable but unavoidable choice.

They can maintain their support for a policy involving the end of mandatory detention and the rejection of offshore processing. This is morally compelling but almost certain to continue to be rejected by the majority of the Australian people and by any future Australian government it is possible to imagine.

Or they can choose to support a policy centred on the idea of an offshore regional processing centre of the kind advocated here. This option is morally troubling. It may turn out to be unrealisable. It is however far more politically realistic. Moreover without the implementation of a scheme such as this, it is possible that the asylum seeker issue could play a significant part in defeating the Labor-Greens alliance and in handing power to the Coalition at the next federal election.

The position I have outlined here is certain to be misrepresented by enemies of asylum seekers on the Right like Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine, who argued falsely and foolishly in the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Herald Sun lastweek that I now believed Howard’s cruel and brutal solution to the asylum seeker problem was politically and morally right. This is a complete distortion of my view. What I have argued consistently is that with his asylum seeker policy Howard poisoned the political culture and destabilised both Labor and the Left for which a real and not fanciful antidote has not yet been found.

The position outlined here will also be attacked by the friends of the asylum seekers for readily understandable reasons. My plea to them is not to vilify its author but to demonstrate with evidence and reason which part of this argument is wrong and to offer an alternative in the present circumstances which is not merely morally attractive but also realistic from the political point of view.